sporadic Nintendo griping

Welcome [PlayStation] Home

Phil “Eych” Harrison unveiled and demoed Sony’s new incarnation of PS3’s soon-coming online nucleus at GDC yesterday to a very pleased audience. Shocking reaction? Nah, it’s mostly developers at GDC. They have no time to get caught up in media opinion.

Comparable to Second Life, PlayStation Home is a virtual community of PS3 owners living together in both public and private environments. Users will be able to login, chat with both text and speech and play casual games together such as pool, bowling and even embedded arcade machines. And when the old stand-bys grow stale, users can invite one another into other PlayStation Network titles outside of PlayStation Home.

Every user will have their own virtual apartment to decorate with furniture, their trophies from various games (see: achievements) and content from their own PS3s. For example, Phil Harrison took a snapshot of us in the crowd, slapped it onto a USB stick and right into a picture frame in his virtual flat. Not content at just images, users will also be allowed to share both music and videos with friends inside their private homes…

And while the download itself is free, users can choose to accentuate their looks with additional clothing for an unspecified fee. The PlayStation Home will also feature dynamic advertising — the details of which are not currently known. A large scale beta for the service begins this April with the final product to see release this Fall.

What else can i say. As a Wii owner, this is sex to my ears. Regardless of whether Nintendo is working on something similar or not, they will pull rabbits out of hats just because of it. I cannot wait to see the repercussions of and responses to this chess move. I imagine 360 people feel the same way. Or jealous, like me.

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You can throw a Bravia down the stairs! Sweet! Sarcasm aside, I do have to admit that the amount of detail exhibited throughout such an early demo is quite impressive. By the time I purchase a PS3, I’m sure this’ll be uber popular and I’ll download it right away…because it’s free.

I do have some problems, however. Again, it’s not very practical. If I want to watch movie trailers, I want to watch a full screen movie trailer–not something within the context of another environment. Second, it’s not enough like a game to keep me interested. Instead of being able to earn new clothing/funiture, players are forced to purchase them. And I really don’t think I can go back to normal, humdrum virtual bowling after owning Wii Sports.

Another thing to consider: Will every piece of electronics be Sony-branded? Or will every movie trailer be produced by Sony pictures?!?!

Hm. I don’t know. Theoretically I think it’s fucking brilliant and Rollin’s right it’s gonna force Nintendo and Microsoft to pull something/anything out of their asses to compete, just like the whole wiimote/sixaxis brouhaha.

But personally, I’m acclimating myself to going out into the real world and getting to know people, so the this and places like second life hold little or no appeal to me these days. 5 years ago I’d be all over it but now? Nah.

Good point. Personally i prob wouldn’t use it beyond finding vs opponents real quick. But remember we’re talking about gamers here. If Second Life, WoW and all the other proliferating MMOs have such communities, at least a *few* PS3 lonelies will wander about in Home.

I could see Nintendo making a sick wifi hub for miis. Alas, the system can’t handle it. There’s a catch to everything.

The looks pretty effing sweet, and as someone who honestly has come to really hate what Sony has done with their console, my eyes lit up when I saw that Home video.

But looking back, I remember how my eyes lit up when I saw a MotorStorm video for the first time, and they lit up everytime Sony showed one of those pre-rendered trailers.

They were a bit darker however, when I realized that even with the “MASSIVE SUPAPOWAR!!!1” of the PS3, not one of it’s games looked as good as their trailers or a 360 game for that matter. You can see where I’m going here. If I’m gonna follow the pattern that’s been going on, I’m gonna have to say the same thing’s going to happen with this service; Disappointment. Even now, it just seems like a glorified chatroom, and will most likely go the way of the Mii Channel in it’s current state. (fun every now and then, but otherwise uselesss.)

MotorStorm looks fantastic on actual gameplay. I’ve tried it out on the demo booths. It far surpasses whatever the 360 can dish out right now.

I like the PS3, but I don’t understand Sony’s strategy… Why show only pre-rendered gameplay of MotorStorm, when they finally have a machine that can show pretty decent footage of actual gameplay?? I understand when they did that with the PS2, having the lowest hardware of the three consoles of its generation, but why not show the muscle of their new machine in their commercials? Don’t they want people to buy PS3s? (Considering how much they lose on each sale, maybe that’s a possibility…)